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P.Brosche The development of the ideas and observational techniques
related to the subject of our meeting "Tidal friction and the
Earth's rotation," Bielefeld, September 1977 is one of the most
fascinating books - not merely chapters - of the modern history of
science. Its genealogical tree is as intricate as that of mankind
itself: There are dead ends and superfluous re-discoveries. Due to
these circumstances and to the pure extent of the topic, it is
impossible to give more than a few highlights here. The first
relevant observational fact was discovered by the famous English
astronomer E. Halley in 1695 (Berry, 1961). He simply could not
arrive at an agreement between ancient and recent eclipses using a
constant mean angular motion of the Moon. Instead, he had to intro
duce an empirical acceleration term in the mean motion. Known as
the "secular acceleration," it has ever since been a most
challenging sub ject of celestial mechanics and a main branch of
the genealogical tree already mentioned. In 1754, completely
independently and almost certainly in ignorance of those
specialists' activities, the German philosopher Kant established
the idea of tidal friction as a decelerating mechanism for the
rotation of the Earth (Felber, 1974). Although he made some errors
in his rough computations, the majority of the constitutive
elements of his concept have survived to the present day (Brosche,
1977)."
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